A JACK KIRBY RETROSPECTIVE

The website Hilobrow has a fine retrospective on Jack Kirby…

“Having helped pioneer the comic-book version of Golden Age science fiction, in the mid-1960s Kirby helped pioneer the comic-book version of New Wave science fiction. New Wave SF is characterized by an ambitious, self-consciously artistic sensibility; in fiction, the movement took off in 1964, when Michael Moorcock took over the editorship of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. New Wave science fiction was less interested in outer space than in the nature of perception, mass media, entropy, and politics. Precisely at this moment, Kirby's Marvel comics began to blow minds with their experimentations in form and content; and - once he moved back to DC - he explored perception, mass media, entropy, and politics in his writings. Kirby's proto-psychedelic photomontages were first seen in '64, which helps demonstrate my theory that the Sixties began that year; and his proto-psychedelic energy fields, known to fans as the "Kirby Krackle," were first seen in '66. He also co-scripted and drew the Argonaut Folly superhero comic series The Inhumans (1965). If The Avengers (1963), and The X-Men are examples of work on the cusp between the comic-book science fiction's Golden Age and New Wave eras, The Inhumans is New Wave.” (Click here for the whole thing.)